What's behind the Big Quit in local government

Welcome to this month’s data dive! In this issue, I’ll explore more of the numbers behind my recent piece for the Rockefeller Institute of Government, “The Great Resignation’s Impact on Local Government.”

If you are a founding member or sign up to become one this week, you’ll receive links to my datasets used for this piece later this week.

Last, there’s less than a week to go to sign up for a free webinar I’m doing Jan. 31 with thought leader Nick Kittle on how governments spent their CARES Act funds and how that applies to the American Rescue Plan Act. Click here to register.

What’s driving the ‘Big Quit’ in government

The latest jobs report showed improvement in the number of hires for November, with nearly every sector—even leisure and hospitality—reporting lower job opening rates.

State and local government is not one of them. In fact, the public workforce’s job opening rate of 3.8% has held for the last two months after hitting a record monthly high in July, and anecdotal evidence points to it staying unusually high in the near future. 

The pandemic is at least partly to blame. In this sense, public sector workers are no different than their private sector counterparts with front line jobs. Government workers are stressed, burnt out and increasingly feel their compensation isn’t worth the risks they are taking during the pandemic. Nearly one-third of workers say that working during the pandemic had made them consider changing jobs, according to a public employee survey from MissionSquare Research Institute. And a record 38% of governments now say workers are accelerating retirement plans.

The data reflects those sentiments. The graph below shows how quits accounted for about half of all government worker departures during most of the pandemic, but more recently they’ve played a bigger role.

Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, Rockefeller Institute of Government

Vaccine mandates in some places are fueling some separations and retirements and it’s expected that will continue. For example, in New York City, nearly 1% of city employees were on leave without pay as a result of being noncompliant with the city’s vaccine mandate.

The wave of experience walking out the door has many concerned about a lack of qualified candidates to take their place. In particular, the public finance workforce—budget analysts and deputy CFOs, for example—has a big age gap. A National Association of State Treasurers study found that 60% of public finance workers are over 45 while less than 20% are younger than 35.

The burgeoning employment crisis is—in some ways—worse than what happened during and after the Great Recession. contrary to what was expected to happen now that governments are flush with cash from the American Rescue Plan. The two graphs below show how job openings increased along with government employment following the lean years of the early 2010s. That’s not the case now.

“There was this assumption that, with the federal funding and relatively robust tax revenues for some, localities would just start being able to hire again and fill their open spots,” Josh Franzel, the managing director of MissionSquare told me. “But our surveys and our case studies are showing that a lot of cities have a hard time finding folks with the skill sets.”

Dig in: The Great Resignation’s Impact on Local Government

Disgruntled law enforcement leads the exodus